Friday Email: 16 August 2013
Every Friday morning our lead analyst Mark Riding sends out his weekly run-down and upcoming events in the investor calendar, like this one:
The market remains set in holiday mode and our fears, expressed last week have come to pass to some extent. We still see no reason to be particularly bullish, but as always there are opportunities to be had. We could suggest short positions, but generally we look to go long. This week we successfully added Imagination Technologies and Imperial Tobacco to our trading portfolio with very good short term outcomes in both caes. Imagination rose over 15% in one day on Wednesday. Imperial bucked the market trend on Thursday rising over 2.5% as the market fell over 100 points. I look forward to our trading portfolio rising over 100% since September 2011 in the not too distant future. It currently sits at 96%.
Dividend increases throughout the week were steady, not spectacular. The highlight was a 15.8% increase from Prudential in what is a very quiet time of the year. The coming week is actually quite busy and eyes will be on some of the big dividend payers such as Carillion to see if they can keep up their very good track record of increaseing their dividend year on year. Our guess is that they will hold at the interim stage and provide the annual increase at the finals barring a disaster in the second half of the year.
The Friday email is delivered to over 20,000 subscriber’s every week, and remains a widely read run-down of recent events and what investors can expect in the week ahead written by our chief analyst Mark Riding.
It’s included as part of the free DividendMax trial.
Read next: 09 August 2013
We expected a correction in the market this past week and so it happened, but not for the reason that we were expecting, which was a blow out number for non farm payrolls last Friday. As it happens they were below expectations so an early end to QE is off the table for now. In the UK there is no danger of QE ending any time soon and the Bank of England is now sending signals of continued low interest rates until 2016 unless there is a surge in employment and inflation.